


Bad Actors

by kazooka



Category: Lucky Sevens, One Shot Campaign Adjacent, Star Wars
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-10
Updated: 2017-02-10
Packaged: 2018-09-23 07:30:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 18,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9646418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kazooka/pseuds/kazooka
Summary: It's been three years since the end of the Clone Wars, but clone trooper Trips can't seem to leave it behind him.





	1. Chapter 1

The weapon didn’t feel quite right in his hand. Republic Army blasters were made specifically for his hand, or those of a hand identical to his. But civilian blasters felt uncomfortable and alien. Still, the feel of the grip and the selector switch clicking off the safety charged his blood with familiar adrenaline, and he moved towards the door with purpose, kicking it where the latch met the wall.

The door broke too easily, and he stumbled through the threshold, catching himself before he went into a full tumble. Two men, a Weequay and an Aqualish stared at him in surprise. The Aqualish raised his blaster, and Trips dove behind a couch, using the momentum from his stumble to carry him down and forward. Crouched and behind cover, he fired a few blind shots to keep his opponents’ heads down, then swung up into a firing position.

“It’s time to pay for _your_ crimes,” he announced.

“What the kark are you doing?” said the Weequay. He was standing with one hand on his hip, and swinging the blaster back and forth on an extended finger. The Aqualish stood next to him, arms folded, and chittered something in its own language that was unmistakably rude.

“My, uh, line,” Trips said.

The Weequay rubbed its forehead ridges.

“Your came in on the wrong cue, you ignored your blocking completely, and I don’t even know where to start with your reading. And the director yelled cut as soon as you kicked down the door. So again: what are you doing?”

Trips gradually became aware of a high pitched ringing sound, wavering in and out of the range of his hearing. An orange Trandoshan shuffled forward, carrying what appeared to be a small staircase. It’s forked tongue slipped in and out of his mouth as he placed the staircase carefully in front of Trips, extended the support legs, then stepped back. A small, red-brown Chandra-Fan stomped up the staircase until he came face to face with Trips and began to flap its arms while opening and closing its mouth. The Trandoshan made a rasping sound and leaned forward to whisper something into the Chandra-Fan’s large ear. The Chandra-Fan reached down to its neck and adjusted a small mechanism at its throat. The ringing was suddenly replaced with a deep, rich, and very angry voice.

“--And now you’ve made me use my vocalizer! You are humiliating me professionally and personally through sheer incompetence!”

“I’m...sorry?” Trips said.

“UNIE! Unie, get over here!”

And then there was Unie. Unie Silthen, multiple Platinum Galaxy award winner as a child, subject of countless tabloid headlines as an adolescent, and responsible for a long string of crashed speeders and broken relationships as she careened into adulthood. She was tall, slender, even for a Falleen, and moved as if gravity were something one could decide to do without. Critics described her in contradictions: ethereal, yet vulnerable; honest, yet enigmatic. She had survived an actor’s childhood through a combination of luck, ignorance, and sheer self-belief. Trips was an anomaly in her life, a stunt cast relationship at the height of the Separatist War, a soldier boyfriend to display her patriotism and atone for her latest public relations disaster. It had turned into something more, or something less, depending on your view of relationships.

She appeared at The Director’s side, a model of attentiveness and competence. Aside from her credited part, Unie played several different roles as an actress: the Diva, the Artist, and occasionally the Businesswoman. This one was new and somewhat disturbing. Trips mentally labeled it as the Secretary.

“Yes, Director?” the Secretary said.

“YOU, are supposed to be responsible for him.”

A brief crack appeared in the Secretary’s facade then swiftly resealed. Trips suspected that the Director would soon be meeting the Businesswoman. The Businesswoman was often the bearer of unfortunate news.

“Apologies, Director. I was just coming back from the producers’ meeting.”

“May I remind you that the only reason that he is here is because of you. Otherwise he would be lucky to be working as the night shift security guard. He is YOUR project, YOUR responsibility, and frankly, I’m not sure that your name is worth having to deal with his incompetence.”

“I’ll certainly make your concerns known to the producers,” Unie said in a tone that managed equal parts cheerfulness and threat.

“Look,” Trips said, “I don’t need to be handled. Tell me what I need to do and I’ll do it.”

The Director swiveled atop his staircase.

“You need to listen to her. You are not good enough to be here. You need to be handled. You need to have strings attached to your arms and legs and marched across the set like a wooden puppet! You need to be kicked off my set entirely, and the only reason that you have not is because your girlfriend is a top-grossing actor!”

Unie stepped between the two of them. The Director was no longer at eye level.

“Let me remind you,” she said, “That this man and others like him were the only thing standing between you, a horde of battle droids, and a lifetime of biopics about Count Dooku.”

“Don’t care! Don’t care don’t care don’t care!” the vocalizer said smoothly and calmly. Trips had begun to suspect that the vocalizer was not an accurate translator of the Director’s mood or intentions. The little Chandra-Fan took one step to the left, teetering precariously on the edge of his staircase, and pointed at Trips.

“I can understand being too stupid to remember your cue, but why, why, WHY did you ignore your blocking.”

Trips shrugged.

“It was silly. You wouldn’t just stand there and give a speech while you had the tactical advantage. You’d shoot them both in the back. You see, I’ve been taking your advice, reading about method acting--”

The vocalizer made a strange strangled noise that its processors couldn’t quite manage to dignify.

“Have. You. Ever. Seen. A holofilm before?”

“Once,” Trips said, lowering his eyes. “Well, half of one. One of Unie’s.”

The vocalizer repeated the strangled noise.

“Break,” the Director said, his vocalizer working at an unusually high pitch. “We’re on break. Half an hour.”

He turned and stormed down the stairs, piercing high-pitched squeaks accompanying every step. The Trandoshan gave Trips an apologetic look as he folded up the staircase and trudged after.

Unie placed a hand on Trips’ shoulder.

“Was I really that bad?” he asked.

Unie smiled at him weakly.

“Let’s talk,” she said.

 

Unie’s trailer was four times the size of Trips’, and capable of interplanetary flight. It was called a trailer largely for contractual obligations, although it retained the rounded oblong shape of the actor’s trailer that had been customary since before spaceflight. The interior changed with the seasons, and each season brought a new, award-winning interior designer. Trips had seen several of these rotations and he himself was beginning to look a bit threadbare in comparison. This season’s aesthetic was sleek, airy, a neo-Art Noveau revival without the floral flourishes. The furniture was all graceful, painted in pale greens and cream colors. A couch and several chairs were placed in the center of the room, and each one gave the impression that if an average person were to sit in it, it would be very uncomfortable.

Trips sat in the uncomfortable chair while Unie busied herself at the mini-bar, creating a thick slurry that combined her nutritionist’s demands for vitamins with her own desire for hard liquor.

“I’m not very good at this, am I?” said Trips.

“You’ve never done it before. It takes time to learn a new skill. You wouldn’t really know, I guess, but it’s difficult.”

Unie took a long drink from her cocktail, which was a disconcerting shade of green.

“You know, I grew up acting, I was in commercials when I was a little kid, I was the lead in school plays, and, sure I caught my break early, but I worked at it. And I still work at it. It takes time, and practice.”

Trips looked up at her.

“So, you were as bad as me once.”

“No. Not really. But I’m a top-grossing actor with three Emgees and a Platinum Galaxy—and that’s before we get into the regional awards--which my publicist says I need to stop listing in detail. It could take a while, Trips. Years, maybe. You know Cauvo Plinn? He played bit parts for twenty years before he broke through.”

Trips looked down at his hands. On Camino, as a fully grown clone trooper, they’d been smooth, and the creases in his palms were spanned by unbroken skin. Now, it seemed like the lines had multiplied. He didn’t remember there being so many, and the skin was tougher, darker, older. There were lines on his face, too. Faint, but definitely there. A crease in his forehead that would only get deeper, eyes set further back in his head than he remembered, relief in the areas above his lips and mouth that would only grow more prominent. He was eighteen years old. Clones aged fast.

“I’m not sure I have that kind of time,” he said.

Unie’s eyes creased with concern. He had never tried to explain the nuances of clone biology to Unie, and the rapid aging of the clones was not necessarily public knowledge. He didn’t really want to have that conversation. It would spawn a number of questions, and he wasn’t armed with any of the answers.

Unie continued on with what Trips was beginning to realize was a prepared speech. Unie never skipped a line, never improvised. She was a professional.

“Well, maybe you should think about the farm again. You seemed to be good at that. When I visited you there you had fields full of--”

“--Rotweed,” Trips said. “Looks a lot like tomaize until about a week before harvest. Then it decomposes and renders the land sterile for everything. Except more rotweed.”

Unie gave him a smile that was stunning despite its practiced wear.

“Maybe you could try it again?”

Trips leaned forward in the uncomfortable chair, which merely altered the way in which it was uncomfortable, if not the degree.

“I’m being fired, aren’t I?”

“No!” said Unie. “No, well, not quite. You’ll still have screen credit, you’ll still be paid, of course, but the producers...they don’t want you to have any more speaking lines. And probably not any more action sequences. There’s some talk of reshooting existing scenes, but we’re already so behind schedule… But—screen credit! That’s a big in for you.”

“Unie,” Trips said, “Are they replacing me with another clone?”

Unie was very quiet for a moment.

“Look, in defense of the producers, he’s really good. And ordinarily this would be a little bit harder to do, but...you know.”

She took a long slug of her nutrition cocktail and dropped the glass on the counter.

“Trips, I’m sorry. I know this isn’t ideal, but--” she sucked in her breath and exhaled slowly. “Do you even like doing this? Are you really disappointed by this?”

Trips stared back at his hands, the knuckles this time, still scarred from a small lifetime of war.

“No. Yes. I don’t know.”

Trips looked up at her. For a large part of his life, she had been a strange creature from a place that wasn’t weapons and armor and a thousand other men that shared his face. She had swept him up into an entirely different world, a confusing world built on shared experiences that he had never even considered. She was callous, had some shocking gaps in empathy, and several alarming pharmaceutical habits, but for all her faults she had been a surprisingly patient and gentle teacher. And, he realized, looking up into her eyes, that she didn’t understand him in the slightest.

“I wanted to be good at something that’s not about destroying,” he said. “And I thought, maybe it would be good to be with you. For us to be together. For once.”

He didn’t immediately recognize Unie’s expression. For a moment, he thought that she was angry at him. And then he realized: it was pity. She placed a hand on his shoulder, then lowered herself into the chair across from his. Her eyes were bright, and her face relaxed in a way that Trips had rarely seen. Unie the actress, the public figure, rarely seen without her armor, had dropped her defenses.

“Trips,” she said, “I don’t really do together. I’m not that kind of girl. You know that. You’ve known that.”

Trips tried to smile, even though he knew it didn’t reach his eyes.

“I’m not very good at this, am I?”

 

It never rained in the city of Ciun. Weather on the planet of Ciuncula was confined to narrow bands circling the planet latitudinaly, and the city of Ciun itself was sited in an area where it hadn’t rained for over three thousand years. A massive river flowed down from one of the rainy bands, and the city drank it almost dry before it struggled out the final few miles into ocean. The terrain surrounding the city was barren, filled with prickly, rugged bushes and gritty, dusty creatures, but the city itself was always warm, and pleasant, kept acceptably verdant through dutiful irrigation.

There was a cafe on the bank of the river, several miles downstream of the wealthy, bluewater shores with the houses of the wealthy and the tourist boardwalk. Here, the river was starting to turn to mud, and occasionally emitted rather more exotic smells than the local Chamber of Commerce would have liked. But the cafe’s simple food was good, and there was an actual selection of tea, not just the three mass-produced and indistinguishable brands that Czerka had inflicted on much of the Core Systems. Trips had found it early on when he had arrived on Ciuncula, and come to realize that it was a rare establishment, a place where no one paid to much attention to you, but where you weren’t ignored. Unie had been uncomfortable with both choices.

The cafe boasted the “best crobarb pie on the planet.” Trips had no point of comparison, so as far as he was concerned, this was undisputed fact. His table held the following items: one mug, half filled with Chublat tea; three empty pie plates and assorted crumbs and discarded napkins; one datapad, displaying a document entitled “New Career Ideas”. The document consisted of a title, a line under the title, and nothing else.

In the Republic Army, Trips had dreamed of civilian life, the freedom, the possibilities. But now, barely two years out, it felt like he had exhausted his options. The truth was, his military training had left him with very few civilian-applicable skills. If he had been a mechanic, or a medic, it would have been easy to anchor himself in civilian life until he could figure out this new world. But he had been a scout, a job whose primary skills had been tracking, hiding, and fighting, and the civilian world had little use for any of these.

He had heard of vast, cultivated natural areas, planets where rich tourists would travel to experience the wilderness. These places needed guides and rangers. It was one of the few things he was trained to do. But he would be alone. Again. He had never considered it when he had taking up farming: loneliness. Surrounded by other clones, moments of privacy were pure luxury, times where you could consider your own thoughts, and be sure that they hadn’t come from the man next to you who shared your genome. The thought that isolation could be anything other than luxury had never crossed his mind. But at the farm, he found himself running into town for simple errands, purposely bumping into strangers for the sole sake of physical contact. When his crop failed it had been a relief to abandon his lonely fields.

Trips typed, “private investigator” into the datapad, then grimaced, finger hovering over the “delete” button. He wasn’t even sure that it was a real job, just something he’d seen in an advertisement for a holofilm.

“You could go back,” he muttered to himself. “Back to the Republic. Be an instructor, never have to kill or fight anyone. Force knows they need instructors the way they’ve been expanding.”

He typed “Return” into the datapad, then placed the pad on the table and stared at the word for several minutes.

The next thoughts he didn’t dare say aloud. He could have stayed with the Jedi Bree Nightrose, accompanied her on her flight from the Republic, stayed with his brothers, with Rook and the others. He could have explored the strange powers that he had gained, his ability to see the Force working in and around living beings. Bree Nightrose had been a Force conduit, a rare individual with the capacity to awaken the Force in others, and she was the reason for Trips’ abilities. At one time, he’d worshiped the Force, even worshiped those who could control the Force and were in turn controlled by it. But by the end of the war, he’d grown disenchanted with all those who claimed the mysteries of the Force for themselves, who claimed that they were the only ones with true understanding. Even so, he might have stayed with Nightrose, with his friends and brothers, if only for the companionship. But after a long war, he had grown tired of fighting, of constantly facing death, of risking all he was and would ever be for the sake of a cause he didn’t completely understand. So he had stayed behind, and watched Nightrose, and Rook, and everyone else fly away into hyperspace. And with the Republic—no, the Empire—hunting down Force users, it was unlikely he would ever see them or the Force ever again.

Someone tapped him on the shoulder, and he was brought out of his reverie.

“Hey buddy, you using that bottle of Daclo sauce? Mine’s all out.”

The girl had brown eyes, only slightly lighter than her dark skin. Her tight black hair was barely contained into two separate puffs sticking out to either side of her head. They framed a wide face, with a grin that was on the perpetual edge of adolescent smirk. And she was blue, flowing in and out of the world, shot through with flashes and starbursts of yellow as if her spirit was throwing up sparks upon contact with the physical. Or that was what Trips saw with his strange vision. She was a Force user. And a relatively strong one as best as he could tell, easily enough for her to have been recruited into the Jedi Academy if the Jedi had found her. Enough to be in trouble if the Imperial Inquisitors found her.

“Hey, buddy, you speak Galactic Standard, right?”

Trips blinked rapidly, then slid the bottle across the table.

The girl reached down, grabbed the bottle, flipped it in the air and caught it again.

“Gets the sauce unstuck from the bottom,” she grinned. She gave him another glance and her smile slipped a little. “You alright, buddy? Need me to call someone?”

Trips shook his head, and the Force vision faded into a hazy afterimage.

“No, sorry. I’m out of sorts.” He waved a hand in the air. “Lost my job today.”

“Bummer,” she said. “Didn’t think you guys had that option. You know, succeed or...” She made the shape of a pistol with her finger and pointed it at him, throwing down the thumb-hammer with a wink.

Trips shook his head.

“No, I’m not a soldier. Not any more. I’m an actor. Well, not any more.”

She rolled her eyes in an ancient ritual of adolescent dismay.

“You too, huh? Everybody on this planet is obsessed with holo-films. I thought you guys would be more practical.”

“To be honest, I’m not sure it was entirely my idea in the first place.”

“Well there you go. You got fired from a job you didn’t like, weren’t any good at, and never really wanted. Chin up, pal, something better’ll come along.”

“Why do you say I wasn’t any good at it?”

“Uh, because you got fired from it. And it was either that or heavy substance abuse. Which I’m not completely ruling out by the way.”

Trips lifted up his cup of tea.

“Fair point. Addicts drink caf. Universally. Look, here’s my advice: get off this planet. It’s a landing pad for egotists and self-delusional stoopas. Good people don’t succeed here. They tread water at best. Which is ironic because this place is basically a desert.”

“Pretty tough judgement. Where do you recommend?”

“Coruscant. Or Corellia. Not sure which. Tell you a secret?” She leaned in conspiratorially. “Just got my Educational Assessment test scores back. Off the charts. I’m accepted early into both the Imperial Academy and University of Correlia. Thought I was spending two more years in this place. Now I’ve got a few weeks to decide which faraway planet I’ll be living on. Got any advice?”

“Corellia,” Trips said, with a bit more emphasis than he had intended. “Definitely Corellia. You absolutely wouldn’t like Coruscant. That would be a very bad decision.”

“Uh, huh,” she said, dubiously. “I’ll take that into consideration.”

Trips leaned back in his booth in what he hoped was a more relaxed pose.

“Seriously, stay away from the seat of the Empire. Lot of the same attitudes as this place. Like I said. You wouldn’t like it.”

“And like I said, I’ll take it into consideration.” She grinned again. “It was good meeting you, Mister.”

“Trips.”

“Mister Trips. I’m Vala Din. Look me up some time if you ever get to Corellia. Or Coruscant.”

She turned around and walked out the cafe doors.

“Just Trips,” he said.

He wondered briefly if he should follow after her. Those with the Force were sure to encounter trouble sooner rather than later. But he doubted that being shanghaied by a clone soldier would have had a positive impact on her life. He leaned back in his seat and took a sip of his tea. It had gone cold.

And then he felt another pair of eyes on him and reflexively shifted to meet them.

This woman was far different from Vala Din. She was a Mirialan, pale green with long dark hair that curled gently down to one shoulder. When he had entered the cafe, he had pegged her as a typical Ciun City starlet, one of a small army of men and women who possessed beauty that would be worshiped on their home planets, but were only somewhat notable in the heart of the holovid empire. But on closer examination, Trips realized that she didn’t possess the facial tattoos of a Mirialan. Instead of the collection of cultural marks and symbols, there was a single tattoo of a snake, wrapped around the front of her throat and following the curve of her jaw up and over and around her eye. He stared as the tattoo uncoiled itself from her eye, lifted its head up to her forehead, and appeared to flick its tongue at him. If she had been watching him, she had averted her gaze.

“Little young for you,” the strange woman said.

Trips jumped a little bit. She still wasn’t looking directly at him.

“That’s not what-- She was talking to me. I didn’t--”

The tossed her hair over to another shoulder, then finally turned to look at him directly.

“Then again, maybe not….trooper.”

She stood up and tossed a credit chip on the counter, then turned and sauntered past him. He could see the lump of a holster pressing against her shiny red jacket. It was well-concealed, but not so much to escape a trained eye. She noticed the direction of his gaze, caught his eye, and then winked at him with a sharp smile. And in that wink, a spark of yellow flared, and Trips saw the Force, a tiny, bright spark of it, but definitely there. He quickly turned away, swallowing his cold tea to hide his surprise as she walked out the door.

A single meeting with a potential Force user was pure chance, something bound to happen if Trips traveled enough. But two of them in the same place at the same time? And what was it he had seen in the Mirialan’s eye? Some special ability?

There was a brief involuntary rush of memory: Bree Nightrose, with her tangled hair and slightly-too-big ears, walking towards the shuttle that would take her to her life as a fugitive. She took a step forward, then turned back to speak: “There is no luck, Trips. There is only the Force.”

Trips leapt up from his table and ran through the front door. He spun one direction, then the other, scanning the shallow urban canyons. Neither Vala Din nor the strange Mirialan woman were anywhere in sight.

“What are you even doing?” he said to himself. “You’re an out-of-work actor. You have problems of your own. And you certainly don’t want to get stuck in someone else’s fight.”

He looked up at the sky, a perfect cerulean blue with a few high, lazy clouds draped across it.

“You hear that? I’m done with you! I’m done with the Force. You don’t have anything for me!”

A pair of Twileks hurried by him, pointedly looking in the other direction. He glared at them as they passed.

And then he chuckled to himself. The girl was gone. The woman was gone. If the Force had wanted him to connect with either, then it had missed its chance. It would have to rope some other fool into whatever shenanigans it had planned. He had been fool enough for a lifetime. He shrugged, then walked back inside to finish his tea and pay his bill.

The owner of the place, a chubby Duros by the name of Rharo Gravanc, was waiting for him as he walked back inside.

“Hey Trips,” he said. “You know the kid who was just here? Your friend with the puffy hair? Left her ID behind. You going to see her anytime soon?”

 

Vala Din lived in a middle class neighborhood in Ciun that aspired to upper middle class. It had Ciun’s characteristic density, each house standing shoulder to shoulder with the next, and the pale pink masonry quarried directly from the dry rock. The buildings here aped the style of the historic downtown, with its elaborate facades and thin columns, but without the filigree or the depth that the old masons bought with time and diligence.

The smart move would have been to abandon Vala Din. For three years, he and his brothers had held the safety of the Republic on their collective shoulders. Surely no one would fault a clone trooper for living for shrugging off the fate of a single citizen or two. And perhaps if he had an excuse to do anything else he might have. But he had no friends, no prospects, and more importantly, he liked Vala Din. She seemed like a good kid, especially undeserving of whatever might be coming down the pipe towards her. In any case, it was just good manners to return her ID. Most likely he would slide the ID in a mail slot or under a door, and let Vala Din go on her way. No fuss, no worry.

He had almost expected the two security officers standing outside of her house. If he had had to guess, he might have predicted local underworld types, or droids, or possibly some kind of vornskyr. But the security officers were well within the tolerance of a reasonable guess. The officers watched Trips approach with the cool concern of large herd animals.

The quality of Ciunculan security forces varied wildly from neighborhood to neighborhood. Often that quality was directly related to local property values, but various ethnic enclaves and organizational attitudes contributed to diverse policing strategies, many of which led with a durasteel-toed boot.

“Clear the area,” said the one on the left, clearly the senior. He was slender, but in that wiry way that camouflages surprising strength. His partner was larger, younger, and perhaps duller, a diffuse copy of his senior associate. Their matching mustaches only accentuated the duplicative effect.

“I have an appointment with Mr. Din,” Trips said.

“Not today you don’t,” said the younger one.

The older officer didn’t say anything, but the corners of his eyes twitched. Trips guessed that the younger one had been told to remain quiet.

“It’s a very urgent appointment,” Trips continued. “Is Mr. Din alright? Should I be concerned?”

The larger duplicate loomed over Trips. Trips could tell he was very practiced at looming, though perhaps not as much with whatever came after. The officer-in-charge put a hand on his partner’s chest.

“There’s been a break-in at the Din house,” he said. “Everything’s under control. We’ll tell Mr. Din you called.”

The telltale sound of blaster fire echoed out from inside the house. Neither officer appeared surprised, nor even turned towards the sound.

“Sounds like things are still breaking,” Trips said.

The larger officer grabbed Trips by the shoulder and sneered.

“It’s time for you to move a—HURK!”

Trips used the hand that had not jabbed into the large man’s throat to reach across and grab the man’s pistol, flick it to stun, and shoot the second security officer straight in the chest. He crumpled with a soft sigh. To his credit, the larger man had almost recovered when Trips shot him in the groin. He added a final shot to the face to make certain that he was knocked out. Trips picked up the wiry officer’s pistol and stuck it in his waistband.

He considered his clothing. In the Separatist War, he had worn a full suit of plasto-ceramic laminate armor with self-cooling capabilities, vacuum seals, toxic filters, and light amplification capacities. Today, he was wearing a loose white tunic with an open chest in the Ciunculean style. He wore black pants, and a set of soft leather boots that were the most durable footwear he could find that was still considered remotely fashionable in Ciun. He was out of practice, undergunned, and quite possibly guilty of assaulting multiple police officers without cause. He shook his head and opened the door.

There was a body on the floor, lying face up. There was not much of Vala Din in his face, but his eyes still held the same warmth and humor, even in death. The man had died instantly from a blaster shot to the chest, his last expression one of surprise rather than fear or pain or desperation. Trips had a sizable mental library of the ways that men died, and this one ranked as relatively pleasant, instant death, the surprise frozen on the man’s face that of vague questioning rather than shock and terror. It was a cold, professional kill, the mark of an assassin rather than a home invader or an angry business partner.

Trips heard a crash from the second floor, and crept carefully up the stairs.

Two men stood before a closed door. One was bashing at the door with a lampstand, while the other held a blaster pistol in the air. A third man sprawled facedown on the floor, dressed in the same unofficial uniform of a plainclothes policeman, all cheap fabric and one-size-fits-all tailoring. And there was another body on the floor.

It was Vala, blaster scores on her chest and arms, a home defense model blaster pistol in her hand. No, not Vala, but a different version of her, one where time had filled in wisdom and confidence where before there was only bravado. Death hadn’t yet stolen the warmth and expression from her face. She had died scared, but resolute and without fear.

The final figure in the room was the Mirialan from the cafe, her snake tattoo riled and angry, it’s tail shaking with eager agitation at the base of her neck. Her pistol was no longer concealed, and she held it with the casual certainty of someone well-practiced with firearms.

“—it’s your fault Vala,” the snake woman said. “If you had just obeyed, your mother would still be alive. But you were too scared. Too scared to save your own mother. Well, now we’re going to kick down the door and drag you out screaming.”

“Go away!” Vala screamed from behind the door. “I’ve called the police!”

“Oh sweetie,” the snake woman smiled. “We jammed all communications long before we came into your home. And we are the police. Good bluff, though. Perhaps if you’d been so quick-witted earlier your mother would still be alive.”

Trips leveled his pistol.

“Don’t move,” he said. “Or you’ll...pay for your crimes.” He said the last part in a small voice and immediately hoped that they hadn’t heard him. He was standing square in the center of the doorway.

The two men froze and slowly raised their hands. The Mirialan turned with an unconcerned air and smiled at Trips.

“The clone from the restaurant,” she said with genuine delight. “Or are you another clone, entirely? So hard to tell with your kind.”

“Careful,” said Trips. “You know what I am, you know how I’m trained.”

“Yes, careful boys,” she smiled. “We’re dealing with a killer here. A killer who’s set his blaster to stun.”

The two goons exchanged looks, then immediately went for their pistols. Trips hit one dead in the chest, then swiveled back behind the doorway as blaster fire slammed into the opposite wall. Trips fired blindly around the corner, but the woman and the remaining thug had already moved.

“Shooting with stun is like playing Sabacc with candy,” the Mirialan woman called out. “No stakes.”

Trips peered around the corner and fired a shot at where her voice was coming from, but she had already moved.

“All those years playing with droids. You ever killed a real person, Killer? Ever seen the life go out of them? Ever held them down as they struggled for one more second in the world?”

Trips peeked out from behind the doorway and caught a brief glimpse of the snake woman striding toward him, pistol in hand. He ducked back as a blaster bolt came howling through the space where his head had been.

“Thought not.”

Trips moved back from the doorway. The Mirialan woman was a professional. Republic doctrine said to fall back to a more fortified position, and he saw no reason to override it. If nothing else it would draw attention away from Vala and possibly give her an opening to escape.

He hurdled over the guardrail, landing directly in front of two more men in plain clothes hurrying up the stairs. The first one went tumbling back as Trips kicked him in the face, the two of them crashing down to the landing together. Trips vaulted over the tangle of limbs on his way deeper into the house. The Mirialan and her remaining agent appeared at the top of the stairs, unleashing a barrage of blaster fire down the stairwell, and directly into the back of one of the unfortunate fellows on the landing, who had leapt up to try and tackle Trips as he passed.

Trips found himself in the kitchen. It was a pass-through layout with two entrances, one leading to the stairwell, the other to a dining room. Trips crouched behind the island and listened. The sound of footsteps echoed down the stairs, then paused at the bottom. There was a careful creak right next to the kitchen doorway. Trips tracked it with the barrel of his pistol. There was a long silence, and then he swung it to the other entrance just before the Mirialan woman appeared, quiet as a snake. He pulled the trigger and both he and the Mirialan froze. Nothing happened. The cop at the door had been running with a low charge. The blaster magazine was empty.

The snake woman broke from her hesitation and fired a shot at Trips just as Trips hurled the empty blaster at her. Her shot went wide as she instinctively ducked the missile. Trips grabbed the refrigerator door and swung it open just in time as blaster fire rocked the appliance, shaking the door and shattering little glass bottles within.

Trips turned to the second doorway to see the last conscious agent step through and pointed his blaster at Trips, who was completely exposed. Trips gave no small amount of consideration to whether or not he could fit inside the refrigerator, and what the consequences of such an act would be. Then the agent fell forward onto his face. Vala Din appeared behind him, holding a heavy-looking lamp stand. She stepped over the fallen goon, and immediately froze, wide-eyed.

“Stop,” the snake woman said. “Move again and I kill the girl.”

Vala Din’s eyes flashed towards him. He reached for the second gun, the one he’d secured from the security forces in the front yard. It was gone, fallen out of his waistband in the commotion.

“Snack time’s over, Killer. Come out from there.”

Trips exhaled deeply. His hip was covered in some kind of barbecue sauce, and his elbow was resting on something moist and rubbery. He moved his arm and felt something hard sticking out of the strange pliable surface. He looked down. It was a leftover hunk of Bantha roast. There was a knife sticking out of it. He grabbed the handle.

Someone in the house had been a cutlery aficionado. It was a heavy paring knife, one with a strange heft to it. Correction, he thought, it was a vibroknife, a specialty item ordered out of an expensive kitchen catalog. It was hardly the equal of one of the KZ-3 combat models issued to Republic soldiers, but it would perform the job it was built for: cutting open flesh.

Trips stood up, letting the refrigerator door swing closed and slid the knife into his sleeve. The Mirialan woman stood a short distance in front of him, pointing her pistol at Vala Din. Her tattoo was curling around her neck, agitated, surging across her throat and then back towards her spine.

Vala Din stood shaking, her mouth set in a rictus that couldn’t decide between fury or terror.

“Who are you?” said Vala Din. “Why are you doing this?”

“I’m Shianta Vax,” the snake woman said, “and I’m doing this for the usual reasons: money, kicks, survival. I was hired. Fill in the blanks.”

She spared a sideways glance towards Trips.

“Clone trooper, stand next to her, if you would. No funny business. I will shoot her.”

Trips stared at her for a moment. He hadn’t mistaken the little glint of yellow fire in her eyes, deep in her sockets.

“You can see her, can’t you,” said Trips. “You can see her in The Force.”

Vax whipped her head towards Trips, looking surprised for the first time since he had met her in the little cafe. His hand came up from his side and he released the knife.

Vax swung her blaster around, but only enough that the vibroknife buried itself in her hand. She shrieked and dropped her pistol. Vala dove for the unconscious man on the floor, while Trips hurtled towards the mercenary. Though he had the element of surprise, Shianta Vax was lightning fast, and kicked him in the jaw. Momentum took his feet out from under him and his head hit the floor hard.

Vax stood over him. She pulled the knife out of her own hand with a grunt. Blood dripped onto his chest from her wound. Trips struggled to move his legs, but his head was swimming, and the signals from his brain weren’t quite reaching his body. His feet scrabbled for purchase on the slick tile floor.

Trips heard the characteristic sound of a blaster pistol being pulled from its holster lock. Then Shianta Vax disappeared from his field of vision, and weapons fire filled the air.

Trips sat up. Blaster bolts hit the walls and cabinetry just above his head, and then there was nothing but the sound of a blaster trigger clicking empty over and over again. Trips slid his hand to the side and felt the grip of Vax’s pistol, grabbed it and hauled himself to his feet. Vala Din was still standing in the kitchen, pistol pointed towards the doorway. She was visibly shaking. Trips stumbled forward in time to see Shianta Vax leap out of a nearby window. Small spatters of blood decorated the floor and the wall next to the window frame. Trips shoved the pistol in his waistband and returned to the kitchen.

Vala Din had let the weapon drop to her side. She was taking big gulping breaths that shook her entire body, eyes wet, but without tears.

“She’s gone,” Trips said. “You’re safe.”

“I don’t—I can’t—Dad. DAD!”

She ran before Trips could stop her. He found her crumpled next to her father, curled up next to him. She didn’t reach out to him or touch him, but kept a small distance between herself and what she was seeing, afraid to participate in that particular reality.

“I knew that Mom...but I thought maybe...”

Trips knelt down next to her.

“I’m sorry, but we can’t stay here. These aren’t criminals. This is the Empire. Imperial security, I’d bet. They’ll return in much greater numbers.”

Vala remained on the floor, staring at a point far beyond the walls of the house.

“I can’t,” she said. “I’m sorry, I can’t.”

Trips stood up and tried to think the situation through. Clones had been both bred and conditioned to have a far higher tolerance for stress than the average human. And no clone had a good analogue for family. Trips had seen hundreds of his brothers die, some of them close friends. But intellectually, he knew that clones didn’t process death the same way as a baseline human. On Ciuncula, he’d had to develop a number of strategies to simulate or exaggerate empathy. None seemed relevant here.

Trips reached down and grabbed Vala, yanking her to her feet then grabbed both of her shoulders, pulling her face to face.

“We don’t have time for this. It’s not right. It’s not fair, but you can’t do this now. Go upstairs. Gather clothes, personal effects, fill a suitcase or bag. Meet me back down here when you’re done. You have two minutes. Take longer than that, and I’ll leave without you. Understand?”

Vala nodded vacantly. Trips released her, and she stumbled up the stairs. Trips watched until he was sure she was gone, then knelt down by her father’s corpse and reached into his pocket. There was a key fob for a speeder inside. Small mercy then, they could at least get some immediate distance between themselves and whoever was hunting Vala. He pocketed the key fob, then cautiously stepped outside. He didn’t trust that Shianta Vax had retreated completely. He walked around the side of the building to the back, where Vax had made her escape. Vax’s red jacket lay discarded in the alley next to a trail of blood. A sleeve had been torn off. Trips approached cautiously, but the snake-tattooed Mirialan didn’t reappear.

The knife must have cut an artery. Shianta, even in her flight, had stopped just long enough to apply a makeshift field dressing. He picked up the jacket. It felt heavy for its size. Trips cautiously probed it with his pistol, expecting armored plates, or more pessimistically, some kind of explosive device. He reached into a pocket and pulled out a datapad. Trips switched it on, but it was encrypted. So not useful at the moment, but enemy intelligence was always a battlefield priority.

He walked back into the house as Vala came running back down the stairs, a large backpack slung over her shoulder.

“Your father owns a speeder. Where is it?”

Vala pointed wordlessly towards a door in the relatively undamaged section of the house. Just beyond was a bone white Gefferon. It was a boat of a vehicle, common enough on Ciuncula streets. It wouldn’t outrun a dedicated pursuer, but it was mundane enough to provide a degree of camoflauge.

Trips took Vala’s bag, threw it in the back seat, then slipped behind the wheel. Vala tentatively took the passenger’s seat. He engaged the propulsers, then pulled out of the garage and accelerated to cruising speed. As they turned off of Vala’s road, they passed a small convoy of local security vehicles full of flashing lights and grim-faced men. None of them paid the strange pair a second look.

“Where are we going?” Vala asked in a small voice.

“I have some...things stashed away. I need to retrieve them.”

“Oh.”

Vala turned to watch the sun setting over the Ciuncula skyline. It had turned a deep red as it began its slide beneath the horizon.

“Why do they want me?”

“Not entirely sure.”

“Did I do something wrong, something illegal?”

“No. You weren’t responsible for this.”

Vala was silent for a pensive moment.

“You said that the woman, that she could ‘see me in the Force’. What did you mean by that?”

Trips briefly took his eyes off the road to look at her. She had been running on adrenaline and reflex for the past half hour. He had pushed her through her initial trauma through sheer assertiveness, but her brain was beginning to reassert itself, and he would have to deal with the consequences sooner rather than later. She stared straight ahead, arms folded tightly against her chest.

“She believes that you had a strong connection to the Force. Do you know what I mean by the Force?”

“Like the old Jedi? Those old religious fanatics that tried to bring down the Republic?”

“That’s...yes, something like that.”

Vala was very still.

“My parents died for what? Some zealot’s made up beliefs? Why did they think I was this, this...mystical figure?”

Trips stared straight ahead, eyes locked to the road.

“Because you are.”

“Bantha druk.”

“If the Jedi still existed, you likely would have been trained at the Temple, taught to be a Jedi, to control your powers.”

“Complete bantha druk. The Jedi were galactic con artists! They were power hungry cultists who tried to seize control for their own ends! There’s no mystical force controlling the galaxy, and if there were, it wasn’t used by a bunch of virgins in uncomfortable robes!”

“I don’t know what they were trying to accomplish. But I do know that they had abilities beyond those of a normal human. I’ve seen it for myself.”

She crossed her arms in disgust.

“Bantha. Druk.”

They drove silently for several minutes, and Trips could feel her anger become almost a physical thing.

“I should have killed them,” she said. “You only stunned them. All those men who came into my home and murdered my parents. I should have killed each and every one of them.”

She glared at Trips.

“YOU should have killed them. What’s with you anyways? You’re a clone. You’re supposed to be a cold-blooded killer. Why didn’t you kill them? Why didn’t you stop them from murdering my parents?!”

She was screaming, fists bunched up, muscles clenched to the point of spasm. The anger had come out of her in a great rush, and she looked surprised by her own ferocity. For a moment, Trips thought that she was going to attack him, and then she relaxed again.

“I don’t kill,” said Trips. “Not unless absolutely necessary. And by the time I got there, your parents were already gone.”

Vala snorted.

“I’ll kill that woman if I see her again.”

“If you can manage it, that would be your choice.”

“Who was she?”

“Shianta Vax, apparently. You know as much as I do. Bounty hunter of some sort, I’d guess.”

He took one hand off the steering wheel and pulled the datapad out of his shirt and handed it to Vala.

“She lost this in the fight. It’s encrypted.”

Vala grabbed it from him greedily.

“This will tell us how to find her?”

“This will tell us how to avoid her.”

Vala’s eyes narrowed, but her gaze didn’t move from the datapad.

“We should go after her. She’s injured, we should track her down and kill her before she comes after us again.”

“Wrong. Our priority is escape and evasion. You have no experience with this and no context for it other than holo-films.

He spared a glance at her, briefly taking his eyes off the road. She was fiddling with the datapad, studiously ignoring him.

“Listen to me,” he said. “Our odds of survival are very low. In another situation, you might be right, we might be better off going on the offensive. But right now, every time we make contact makes it that much more likely that we die or worse. We can’t take a risk without clear gains. Is there anything to be immediately gained from attacking that woman?”

Vala folded her arms.

“It would make me feel better.”

“I’m not so sure it would,” said Trips.

Vala was silent for the rest of the ride.


	2. Chapter 2

Trips had rented a storage facility on the outskirts of Ciuncula. Out here, the irrigation tapered off, and the desert reasserted itself. The facility was a dusty stack of boxes, piled high by an automated droid-crane.

Vala was unimpressed.

“This place probably makes more money repossessing stuff than renting,” she said. “What are we doing here?”

Trips tugged at a corner of his torn and bloody tunic.

“Change of clothes,” he said.

“Whatever,” she said, and climbed over the back seat and began rummaging through her bag. “This datapad is only using basic encryption. I can crack it.”

“Do what you can,” said Trips. “Call if you need me.”

The droid-crane quickly located Trips’ container, pulled it from the stack, and placed it in one of the inspection slots. Trips keyed in the access code and the container doors swung open. He had rented the container when he first came to Ciuncula, used it to store the artifacts from his past life. He had thought about letting the contract expire, leaving the contents to the storage company, where they would be sold and distributed quietly and without fuss. But something had always stopped him: perhaps his own lack of success, perhaps the growing encroachments by the Empire, perhaps simple nostalgia. Whatever his reasons, he silently congratulated his past self’s foresight.

The front of the container was piled high with boxes. Some of them contained old clothes, others souvenirs from his time in the military, others spare seed packets. But many were empty. He pulled a few of these off the top of the haphazard wall. Beyond the boxes, the container was clean, neat, well organized. A set of white, Republic regulation armor stood at the back of the container, its grim visage staring out the entrance. The armor was polished, well-maintained, but it was also covered in the kinds of scrapes, dents, and carbon scoring that couldn’t be buffed out. It was also illegal for a private citizen to own, but it wasn’t unusual for clones to call in favors with their brothers in the quartermaster’s office when they left the service. The Inspector General’s office largely looked the other way where clone armor was concerned. The weapons on the wall were not as easily overlooked, but Trips had finished his war with a number of outstanding favors, and several items had fallen into the strange grey area of “clone possessions”, the clones themselves being considered possessions.

He stripped out of his civilian clothes and pulled on an old Republic bodysuit that he had stashed in one of his masking boxes. It clung to him, heavy with old associations and expectations. He had grown tolerant of civilian clothing, but never been completely comfortable with it. It had felt like a disguise, another item from the costumes department. He began to strap the armor on. After two years, it was a strange feeling, the old muscle memories half forgotten. Part of him found comfort in the familiar, in suddenly having clear goals and certain enemies. Another part of him was screaming at him that he was being pulled back in to the very thing he’d tried hardest to get away from.

He pulled the helmet on to check the fit. It still smelled faintly of old sweat. He pulled it back off and threw it in a rucksack. The helmet would draw more attention than not, and he didn’t want to wear it unless combat was imminent. Other items found their way onto his rigging: the heavy pistol, the medical pack, ammo pouches, a glow rod, stun baton. Finally, he took down the most blatantly non-standard piece of equipment in the container: a long vibrosword with a curved handle. He drew it out of its holster, inspecting it in the pale internal lighting of the container. It had an eerie sheen to it, but showed no sign of its years of disuse. Trips slid it back into its holster, then strapped it to his belt. A large cloak covered most of the armor and weaponry, not enough to disguise him as a full civilian, but enough to temporarily disguise the fact that he would be carrying enough firepower to level a city block.

He completed his packing with a few sets of civilian clothing mixed in with various standard military tools, then threw his rucksack on his back, locked the container, and returned to the car. Vala was still sitting in the passenger seat, reading Shianta Vax’s datapad.

“You only gave me two minutes,” Vala said accusingly. She looked up. “Oh. Wow. Just...keeping that around for a rainy day, huh?”

Trips tossed his rucksack in the back of the speeder.

“Hey,” Vala said, “important question. Probably should have asked this earlier: Who the kriff are you?”

Trips looked at her quizzically.

“CT-7773,” he said. “I’m Trips.”

“Okay, right, got that. But like, who are you? Like, why were you at my house? You took out like six guys and nearly got that crazy supervillain Mirialan almost-singlehandedly. That seems like a lot, even for a clone trooper. Also, you’ve got a sword.”

She pointed at his sword.

“A sword. Nobody has a sword. That’s ridiculous.”

“Droids in the Separatist War were optimized to fight at range. Closing to hand-to-hand put them at a signficant disadvantage, kept them from using their numbers against you.”

Vala stared at Trips for a single beat.

“Who are you?!”

Trips sighed and slid into the driver’s seat.

“The Mirialan woman was at the cafe. I thought she might be following you. I had a bad feeling about it. Wasn’t going to pursue it any further. Then, you left your ID at the counter.”

“So the only thing standing between me and being brain-washed into a weird religious cult was me being absent-minded?”

“That’s about it.”

“Look, I don’t know you. I mean, thank you. Really. Thanks. But I have no idea who you are. And now you’re dressed for a siege, and I’m a fugitive, I guess. And I don’t know who you are or if I should listening to you or what I should be doing at all!”

She stared at Trips expectantly. She wanted answers. Trips had none. Or at least, no good ones. The ones he had, he didn’t like. And Vala was clearly not ready for the idea that a mystical cosmic power had brought them together for its own vague purposes.

“Back during the war, I was part of a squad attached to a Jedi Knight. We were sent to perform tasks for the Jedi Council, often highly difficult assignments without clear objectives. I know a few things about the Jedi, I know some things about their enemies, and I know some things about the Force.

When the war ended, I left the Republic Army. I didn’t want to fight anymore, never really wanted to in the first place. But I am good at it. It may be the only thing that I actually am good at.

You want answers. You want reasons to trust me. I don’t have them. You can turn yourself in if you want. I don’t advise it. You’ll end up right back with the woman with the snake tattoo. That’s all I can tell you.”

Vala sighed, a long deflated exhalation.

“How about a plan then? Do you know what we should do?”

“We need to get off this planet. That will give us more options. But they’ll have the ports locked down by now. Unless you have a ship, we’re going to have to figure out something else. Maybe hide out until the spaceports are reopened.”

“A ship?” said Vala.

She flipped the datapad towards Trips and a string of text flashed across the screen.

“Access codes. Docking permits. Security clearance. We need a ship? We take it from this chu ta.”

 

The bounty hunter’s ship was landed in a small private facility well away from Ciancula’s main spaceport. Trips parked the speeder a block away in the shadow of a long-closed droid repair shop and leaned against the speeder, watching the grounds with a pair of binoculars.

“Do I get a gun?” said Vala.

“No.”

“Last time I had a gun I saved your life.”

“Last time you had a gu—a blaster, you nearly killed me.”

“Then what are we gonna do? Because that looks like a lot of guys. Even for you.”

Trips counted twelve security officers, deployed in a standard cordon and patrol. The ship itself was buried in shadow in a moderately-sized hangar, open just far enough to make out some spikey contours.

“It’s not the guards I’m worried about, it’s alarms.”

“Because they could call more guards?”

“Because if someone’s in the ship, they could lock it down, cut off our only real escape route. And then call more guards.”

“So we’re screwed?”

“Nope. We’re going to walk right into the ship.”

“So constructive criticism: I like the outcomes, but I’m concerned about the overall concept.”

Trips produced a set of restraints from his utility belt, and dangled them at arm’s length over Vala.

“It’s an old trick, but a good one. No one questions a clone who says he’s doing the Empire’s business.”

Vala squinted at the cuffs.

“You’ve done this before?”

“Absolutely.”

She took the restraints from Trips with the care of someone offered an old, dead fish, then locked them around her wrists.

“And it worked?”

“More or less.”

“That was a yes or no question!”

Trips opened her door and extended a hand. Vala looked at it, shook her head, then hauled herself to her feet without assistance.

“You realize that they’re probably looking for a clone and a sixteen-year-old girl with poofy hair, right? We aren’t exactly inconspicuous.”

“Doesn’t matter. The goal is to get into the ship. Either they believe me and they escort us in, or they don’t believe me, take me prisoner, and escort us in.”

“Or they don’t believe you, shoot you, capture me, and I begin my new life in a crazy death cult.”

“Two out of three isn’t so bad.”

“That is not how probability works.” ( _ed: In clone training, they never taught them the odds._ ) “They are actively looking for a clone and a teenage girl. They are going to shoot us on sight.”

“No,” Trips said, “They won’t have orders to shoot on sight, because they want you alive. First they’ll dither a bit, maybe call in their commanding officer, move in close. That will give me the opportunity to act at short range, create confusion and uncertainty. And under the cover of that, we board the ship.”

“Trips, please… I don’t want to….”

Trips turned to face her, then squatted down slightly so that their eyes were level.

“Vala, listen to me. We don’t have any safe options. If we want to survive, we have to take risks. What we’re about to do here, isn’t ideal, but it’s workable. I can’t give you any guarantees. But I can tell you that I came through some of the fiercest fighting in the Separatist Wars. I’m very good at this. You need to trust me. Can you do that, if only for now?”

Vala nodded quietly.

“Alright. Let’s do this,” she said, and her voice only quavered slightly.

They approached the gate.

“If there’s shooting,” said Trips, “Go to ground immediately. Lie flat until I tell you it’s safe to get up.”

He fingered his heavy blaster, switched the selector from stun to the lethal setting, then back to stun. They emerged into the floodlights that framed the entrance.

The gate swung up, creaking and shuttering. Two guards stood just inside, saluting.

“Welcome back, commander,” one of them said.

Trips instinctively returned the salutes, then pushed Vala forward. They walked into the complex completely unmolested.

“I can’t believe that worked,” Vala said once they were out of earshot.

“Maybe,” said Trips.

“What do you mean ‘maybe’?”

“There may be...complications.”

He stopped talking as an officer approached them, a lieutenant with the local security forces. He had a thin, pinched face and a slightly upturned nose, features that almost had to be cultivated in some misguided attempt at upper class aspirations.

“Commander,” he greeted them, “I hadn’t realized you’d left! I see you’ve had a productive night.”

The lieutenant motioned towards Vala.

“Surprisingly so,” said Trips.

“And what sort of criminal have you caught here? Terrorist? Rabblerouser? Spy?” He wrinkled his nose. “Seems rather young...”

“I’d advise you not to get too close, Lieutenant,” Trips said. “She uses her youthful appearance like a weapon. She’s quite lethal at close range.”

The Lieutenant took a small step backwards.

“Oh, well, I suppose I should have anticipated. But what has she done?”

“Asked a lot of questions that didn’t concern her.”

“Oh,” the lieutenant said with a chagrined expression. He glanced down at the sword on Trips’ belt. “Huh, that’s new.” He blinked and looked back up. “Not that I’m questioning anything.”

Trips snorted.

“Lieutenant, are you sure that you didn’t see me leave earlier this evening?”

“I was fairly positive, I mean my post looks directly out on both exits, but obviously you left, so I must have just missed you…”

“Keep a closer eye next time,” Trips said. “Dismissed.”

The lieutenant glided backwards in a wash of bumbling apologies. Trips and Vala continued on towards the hangar. The bay door was open, and softly lit within. Trips had expected an Imperial shuttle, or some kind of repurposed light freighter. But the ship that crouched inside was vaguely insectoid, with faceted surfaces of black and red staring out into the night. There was something of an ambush predator to it. It did not look welcoming.

“There’s another clone on that ship, isn’t there?,” said Vala.

“Most likely.”

“Someone just as dangerous as you?”

“Probably.”

“How do you fight someone who’s identical to you in every way?”

“Hope that your training was superior,” said Trips. “Or get the jump on them.”

They walked into the hangar and up the ramp of the ship. The interior matched the aesthetic of the exterior, only with an angry red glow instead of a bristling carapace.

“I didn’t expect this out of Shianta or whatever her name is,” said Vala.

“I don’t think it’s her ship,” said Trips. “Or at least, she’s not in charge.”

“Then who is?”

“Best hope we don’t find out. Stay here.”

Trips crept through the ship, blaster pointed around every corner. It was quiet, and even the normal hum of a starship at rest seemed muted. He made his way through the front of the ship, where the faint sounds of music emanated. He posted up against the entryway to the cockpit, and bobbed his head to quickly scan the interior. There was a figure there, sitting in the pilot’s seat in the darkness. Twilek pop played over the loudspeaker, and the figure was waving a hand in rhythm with the music. Trips stepped carefully through the entryway and trained his blaster on the figure.

The figure stiffened and the chair swung around, revealing another clone with a nearly identical haircut to Trips’. That haircut had been a request from Unie, and therefore on the bleeding edge of Ciunian cool. Unlike Trips, this clone wore jewelry, a wide gold chain, and thick gold wristbands. A jeweled stud sparkled in his ear.

“Who the kriff are you?” the mystery clone said.

Trips shot him in the chest with the stunner and his head rolled back onto the headrest.

When Trips returned to the entry ramp, dragging the other clone behind him, Vala had removed her cuffs. Trips hadn’t given her the keys.

“What?” she said dangling an empty pair of cuffs in front of her. “Dad was a special effects engineer. He loved teaching me stuff like this.” Her voice caught briefly, but recovered.

Trips let the unconscious clone fall.

“Can you fly this ship?” he asked.

“Sure. I’m best with the YT-1200, but I’ve got silver ranks in three different types of shuttlecraft. This shouldn’t be any different.”

“Silver is good?”

“Good enough,” Vala said. She frowned, staring out a nearby porthole. “I think that lieutenant is coming back.” She spun towards Trips in alarm. “And he’s not alone. He’s got four or five men with him.”

“Are we ready to take off yet?”

“No, the reactor’s spun down, and I’m locked out of navigation and engineering. I’ll need a few minutes.”

“Seal the hatches and get us ready for take off,” Trips said. “I’ll deal with the officer.”

Vala tapped several keys on a nearby panel, and the doors closed and sealed. She took off for the interior of the ship as Trips began to strip out of his armor. The intercom came on.

“Commander? Commander, are you okay?”

Trips hit the transmit button.

“Give me a minute,” he said.

He stripped the jewelry off of the unconscious clone, hastily sliding on the bracelets and necklace before stashing his discarded armor in a nearby compartment.

“Commander, I really must insist you open the door. There’s been a perimeter breach.”

Trips growled and went to hit the release button, then stopped. He squatted next to the clone and detached the man’s earring. He groaned, then grabbed a hold of his ear with one hand and jabbed the piece into his earlobe with the other. Wiping the blood off with his sleeve, he triggered the door release.

Four men in grey uniforms aimed their rifles at him. The lieutenant stood off to the side, blinking nervously. He glanced down at the unconscious clone on the floor, then back at Trips.

“Uh, Commander?” he asked. His men lowered their weapons.

“You’re damned lucky I got the drop on him, otherwise you’d be explaining to Imperial security how you let a rebel walk right past you and steal this ship.”

“Of course, Commander, I should have known you’d be a match for any—“

“Stow it. It took you long enough to figure out. What finally tipped you off.”

“Your uh, earpiece, sir. I realized the impostor was not, uh, properly attired just after I spoke to him.”

Trips sighed and rubbed his temples. He hoped it was an accurate rendition of the gesture that his old squadmate, Shutter, made whenever Trips had done something particularly unorthodox.

“Lieutenant, there are only about a million people in the galaxy who look exactly like me. If you let every single one of them onto my ship, then what the hell is the point of having you here at all?”

The lieutenant visibly cringed.

“My deepest apologies, Commander. I will see to it that—“

“I don’t care how you do your job, just that you do it.”

Trips nudged the clone on the floor with his toe.

“And get this moof off my ship. Someone will come to question this man, so keep him secure. The girl will be staying. She’s of Imperial interest.”

The four lower-ranking men immediately moved forward to gather up the fallen commander. Trips started to walk away, then stopped.

“Oh, and Lieutenant? He’s already pretended to be me once. If you come back here claiming that he’s the real Commander, I will have you shot.”

Trips pushed a button on the wall panel and the hatch sealed, leaving the lieutenant apologizing to a door.

“I thought you were a terrible actor,” Vala said, stepping out from behind a bulkhead.

“I’m not good with scripts,” he said.

Vala quirked an eyebrow.

“How close are we to taking off?” Trips said.

“Oh, uh, yeah. There’s...something in the cargo hold.”

“Something?”

“Yeah. You need to see this.”

 

Trips’ initial impression was that someone had uphoulstered a forklift. The creature was immense, a wall of grey fur and white spots hunched over and supporting its weight on its knuckles. Clearly it’s strength matched its size, as it was locked behind a heavy-duty electron wall. It was eerily still, staring at Trips with a degree of unnerving attention. Trips realized with a start that what he had taken to be eyes were particularly large white spots. Looking closer, he couldn’t see anything that looked like an eye anywhere on the creature, though the large ears sticking straight out to the side of its flat head more than compensated.

“What is it?” asked Vala.

“Don’t know,” said Trips. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“That figures. Weird black and red ship, spooky lighting, giant terrifying creature locked up in the hold...am I being hunted by vampires?”

Trips took several steps closer. Now that he was better acclimated to the creature’s scale, he realized that most of its size came from its width rather than height. It wasn’t much taller than he was, but it was at least twice as wide. It tilted its head at Trips as he approached.

“And space vampires isn’t even half of it,” Vala continued. “There’s a giant egg over there in a stasis pod. I don’t even want to know what kind of scaly horror is going to hatch out of that thing.”

Trips turned his head. There was, indeed, a huge leathery egg, approximately two-and-a-half feet long, locked in a glowing red stasis cage. He turned his gaze back towards the creature in the cell. It still hadn’t moved, and was still “staring” at him. Trips cautiously put a hand up.

“Hello?” he said.

The creature reared back slightly and tilted its head to the other side.

“Hello,” it said in a deep voice.

Behind him, Vala emitted something like a violent hiccup.

Trips took a step backwards.

The creature’s head extended forwards, almost touching the electron wall then tilted slightly, clearly expecting a response. Trips looked back at Vala, who shrugged.

“What are you doing?” the creature asked. It’s mouth curved from one side of its flat head to the other, flashing white teeth when it spoke. Trips tried not to think about how much of his body would fit into that mouth.

“Stealing this ship,” Vala said, helpfully. Trips gave her a brief glare.

“Why are you doing that?” said the creature.

“Tactical necessity,” said Trips. “And...hold on, why are you asking the questions here? You’re in a cell.”

“Yes.”

“Why are you imprisoned here?”

The creature tilted its head the other way. Trips took a small step to the left, and the creature’s head turned with him.

“Because somebody put me in this cage,” it said. Coming from another being, this would have sounded like sarcasm, but Trips had the impression of honesty taken to its furthest end.

“You don’t have eyes. You’re using, what, sonar?”

“I listen to the reflections in the soundscape, yes. There is no adequate word for it in your language.”

“Who are you? What are you?”

“I was never given a name. I have a unit identifier. Is that adequate?”

“Sure,” said Trips. “Just so I can call you something.”

The creature erupted in a cacophony of clicks, whistles, and rumbles, starting with a noise that made Trips’ bowels vaguely uncomfortable, then pitching higher until his ears were ringing, then disappearing into ultrafrequencies.

“There’s no way I’m going to be able to say that,” Trips said.

“I can narrow it to your speaking range.”

There was a slightly less uncomfortable sequence of clicks and hums.

“Best I can do out of that is ‘Kilka’” Vala said.

“That is a reasonable approximation for your vocal range.”

“Kilka,” said Trips. “Would you harm us if we let you out?”

Vala grabbed Trips’ arm and pulled him away from the cage.

“Are you crazy,” she whispered in his ear, “You’re going to let that thing out on just its word?”

“It’s imprisoned here. An enemy of the people that are hunting us.”

“Or it’s just plain dangerous. Like every other thing on this ship.”

“Good. We need dangerous things. Dangerous people are hunting us. We need dangerous allies.”

“Yeah, but...we don’t know what kind of dangerous this is. And...this thing—it uses echolocation so it can probably hear us whispering, can’t it?”

“Yes,” Kilka affirmed from across the room.

“Well, Kilka,” Trips said, “Would you harm us if released?”

Kilka tilted its head again.

“Only if you yourselves were threats.”

“Good enough for me,” said Trips. He approached the control panel, and triggered the containment release.

The ship was suddenly moving underneath him, and he hit the opposite wall with the force of a speeder crash. He rolled onto his side to see Kilka advancing on him with an odd rolling gait. He found himself floating into the air, unable to breathe, as if he were in a dream. He was upside down and somebody was yelling. He blinked, and Kilka’s huge head came into focus. Even without eyes, Trips could feel the anger of the alien, sense it in the set of its jaw, and the tension in its broad forehead.

“You put me here,” it said. “Releasing me does not absolve your debt.”

“No!” Vala screamed. She was suddenly in between the two of them, waving her arms. “It’s not him. The other guy on this ship looks just like him!”

Kilka made a loud huffing noise, and turned its head towards Vala, then pushed her aside with a surprisingly gentle motion.

“Your species is not so homogenous.” it said. But it relaxed slightly and made a noise like the creaking of an old wooden chair. Trips felt a vaguely uncomfortable sensation in his gut.

“Strange. Different scars. This other, he was a litter mate?”

“Of sorts,” Trips said. “I only met him a few minutes ago.”

“Then you are not responsible.”

There was an abrupt change in pressure, and then Trips came crashing to the ground.

“Where is this litter mate?”

“Gone,” said Vala. “Not on the ship anymore. They took him outside.”

Kilka turned, and began to walk away. Trips pulled himself into a kneeling position and spit out a moderate amount of blood onto the floor.

“Wait, are you leaving?” asked Vala.

“That’s not a good idea,” Trips said.

Kilka made a low rumbling noise.

“I’ve been imprisoned in this place for too long. I do not wish to remain.”

“I understand,” Trips said, “But if you go out there, you’ll almost certainly be killed or recaptured.”

“Then I am still imprisoned?”

“No, I won’t stop you from leaving, but the people who imprisoned you are still out there. And they control this entire planet. They’d hunt you down. Again.”

“All I wish to do is smell the night air, hear the calls of birds.” Kilka paused. “And to destroy the one who imprisoned me.”

Trips slowly drew up to full height, testing his limbs for breaks or sprains.

“We can give you that chance—well, the birds and the night air at least. But please, if you leave now, you’ll get us captured as well as yourself.”

Kilka sighed melodically.

“I have waited for so long...I can wait a while longer.”

Kilka took several steps towards the exit.

“But not in this room.”

And it walked through the door with its strange rolling gait.

“There’s more,” said Vala.

“Really?” said Trips.

“I was able to get into the ship’s logs. I wasn’t their only target on Ciuncula. They’re out there right now, looking for someone else.”

“Lucky. If the full complement was onboard, we wouldn’t have been able to take over and we would have—what?”

Vala was staring at Trips with an incredulous look.

“The only reason I’m here is because you jumped in. Because you just thought I might be in trouble. Now we know somebody else is in the same kind of mess and you’re not even bothered?”

Trips shook his head.

“We’ve been lucky to get this far. Really, truly lucky. This person, I’d help them if I could, but there is next to no chance of success. In war you have to learn when to accept losses. You have to know that trying to save everyone will only get more people killed.”

“We’re not at war.”

Trips narrowed his eyes.

“Yes we are. You just haven’t realized it yet.”

Vala shoved him, which largely served to throw her backwards.

“Do you actually think I don’t know the stakes here? I just lost my entire family! And somebody else out there is about to lose theirs as well! My life is ruined, Trips. No matter what I do, no matter what you do.”

Trips placed both hands on her shoulders and drew her closer.

“You have to pick your battles, Vala. You have to know what you’re risking and what you’re gaining.”

Vala shook her head; furious, wet eyes looking away.

“Get the ship ready for takeoff,” Trips said. “I’m going to check the crew quarters.”

He left her there, tiny and slouched in the cavernous space of the cargo hold.


	3. Chapter 3

The crew quarters were spacious for a star-faring vessel: enough room for a bed and some space for a desk. They were closer to an economy hotel room than the cramped bunks that Trips was familiar with. The first room he opened up was gaudy, painted in black and gold filigree, and spotted with Mandalorian fans and figurines. The lighting scheme was bright white, and strangely familiar. The bedspread was covered in some kind of animal print, an animal with which Trips was unfamiliar. Trips briefly mistook it for Shianta’s room, and then realized that an open jewelry case held a number of pieces that were far too large: it was the room of the clone he’d stunned in the cockpit. Trips closed the case. A name was printed in great, gold letters on the front: “Avarice.”

“Tell me he doesn’t call himself that,” Trips muttered to himself.

Other than an unusually large wardrobe, Avarice’s room held little of interest.

The next room eschewed the red and black color scheme, and was instead lit in warm yellows. While relatively spare, there were several personal touches: a rug with a strange pattern in earth tones, a desk with wood surfaces. It was an oddly impersonal space, with little to identify the owner. But Trips had a strange feeling he was looking at Shianta’s quarters. It was not what he would have pictured from the brash and razored woman who had nearly killed him in Vala’s house. This place felt oddly comforting. Trips poked through the desk, and found nothing but a few stray technical manuals and a datapad of historical fiction.

The third room shared the color scheme of the rest of the ship: black and red. There was little here other than a bed and some strange, wall-mounted statues that looked like twisted and thorny branches. Trips shivered involuntarily. He had some sense of what sort of person kept a room like this, and was not eager for them to reclaim their property.

The last room was, in some ways, the strangest of them all. It was a duplicate of the other red and black room, sparsely furnished, covered in thorns. But there was something careless about the way it was laid out, the bed with its wrinkled blankets and slightly off-kilter, and several incongruous storage containers stowed in a corner. It didn’t have the stark, rigorous discipline of the previous room. Trips opened one of the storage containers. It was empty. Or rather, it was built to appear empty. Trips pulled up the false bottom to find: several colorful stones. He picked one up and rolled it around in his hand. He could feel no influence on the Force exerted through it. It wasn’t cool or warm to the touch, no strange energy field around it. As best as he could tell, it was merely a rock. A pretty rock.

He placed the colorful rock back in the container and turned to leave, but the door slid shut before he could exit. He tapped the control, but it had no effect. There was an intercom panel nearby and he keyed the transmit button.

“Vala, the door in one of the crew quarters malfunctioned; I’m trapped in here.”

In response, he heard the low grade hum of the ship shift frequency, and he felt it move underneath him.

“Vala? VALA?!”

He could feel the ship’s inertia shift underneath him, and heard the thrum of the repulsors as they spooled up. There was a horrific scraping sound, then the gentle lift of the repulsors fully engaging and separating them from Ciancula’s gravity. He banged on the door, yelling, but either Vala couldn’t hear him, or she wasn’t listening. After a while, the repulsor hum slowly trailed off, and there was the characteristic thunk of a ship making landing. The ion drives hadn’t engaged, and he certainly hadn’t felt the hyperdrive. They were still on Ciuncula.

After several minutes, he sat on the bed, then folded his feet up under himself and slowed his breathing. During the Separatist War, Trips had learned to take advantage of the quiet times between the shock and fear. It was often not a good idea to dwell on possibilities in the middle of a war. Trips cleared his mind and focused on the movement of air through his body. After several more minutes there was a knock on the door, as if it had been tapped by the world’s gentlest battering ram. Trips opened his eyes.

“Kilka?”

There was a brief silence.

“You never told me your identifier,” Kilka said from behind the door.

“It’s Trips. I’m Trips.”

He stood up and walked to the door.

“Ah,” said Kilka. There was another pause. “Trips?”

“Uh, yes?”

Another pause, somewhat briefer, then: “I do not understand this interaction.”

“Kilka,” Trips said, “Can you open the door for me?”

“Yes,” said Kilka.

The door did not open. Trips sighed.

“Kilka,” he said, “Will you please open the door for me?”

“Can you not open the door yourself?” Kilka asked.

“No, I think Vala locked me in here.”

“Vala imprisoned you? What is Vala?”

“She’s the girl you met earlier. I think she locked me in here so I wouldn’t keep her from doing something really stupid. Kilka, I think she’s in trouble.”

“Ah,” said Kilka. “I see.” Another pause. “Would you harm me if I let you out?”

“No,” Trips said.

“Ah,” said Kilka. “That’s good enough for me.”

There was the sound of tapping from the other side of the door.

“The button does not work.”

Trips groaned.

“Okay, she’s locked out the entire control circuit, then. Kilka, I’m going to need you to do some wiring work on the other end of the ship. You’ll have to find the access panel, identify the motivator control circuits and reverse their polarities. Can you do that?”

This time there was a very lengthy pause. Then the sound of plasteel creaking and snapping as the door was wrenched out of its mount and tossed down the hallway. Kilka appeared on the other side.

“No,” it said. “I cannot do that.”

 

Vala had landed in an open area near Ciencula’s night market. The night market had started as a kind of rolling festival, one which used spectacle and bright flashes of light to cover up the recreational drug use of various participants. Over the years, the night market had evolved into a more commercial enterprise, with the drug trade sprouting markets for food and drink, then for stolen goods, then for questionable legal goods, and then developing its own tourist infrastructure, complete with cheap clothing and misshapen figurines. But the focus of the night market was always on the carnival puppets, immense creations held up by hundreds of volunteers and painted in light-emitting fluorescent paint. Each artifice had its own pulsing soundtrack, either ebbing from speakers hidden within, or chants from the puppeteers, or occasionally from groups of musical instruments played from within the beasts. They stalked through the old light industrial neighborhoods, throwing bizarre shadows on the old warehouses and cranes.

As Trips slipped through the crowd, a full-scale Rancor came stomping past, blue lights spiraling up its legs in semi-circles, and orange eyes glowing in neon. Its mouth opened, and Trips was briefly hypnotized by a spinning wall of color and shape that undulated within the puppet-creature. He looked away with some effort. A laughing human woman, glazed over with glitterstem, kissed him on the cheek, and draped her discarded robe over his shoulder. He gently set her adrift back into the flow of humanity coursing around him.

Trips had never been to the night market before, but almost immediately he was able to pick out the human underbelly, the addicts and the dealers, the thieves and pickpockets, the beggars and the generally deranged. It was a whole separate society walking among the tourists and bourgeois visitors, and the only thing that differentiated them was that they never looked up. After a few minutes, Trips lived in their world too, set against the backdrop of faceless crowds tilted ever upwards.

He averted a pickpocket almost absentmindedly, twisting the boy’s hand until he cried out. Trips released him without looking at him and marked several other rough figures quietly melting away into the crowd. Trips hadn’t taken the time to don his full armor and infantry kit. He wore little more than the scout’s cloak, and the three holstered belt with his sword, pistol, and grapple gun. Each item dangled from his belt temptingly, a ripe apple for anyone with a quick hand and an expansive definition of private property. He hoped another demonstration would not be necessary.

Ordinarily, finding a single person in the night market masses would have been futile. You could pass within an arm’s distance of your target and never realize it. But Trips had an advantage that few others possessed. After a half hour of searching, he spotted Vala’s yellow glow, broadcasting her location from the tips of her afro-puffs. She had a blaster pistol tucked in her waistband, probably something the other clone had secreted in the cockpit. Trips slid through the crowd until he was right behind her, then pressed the barrel of his blaster in the small of her back. Vala froze.

“I don’t want to carry you out,” he said, “But I will stun you if I need to.”

“Jazak Brask,” she said.

“What?”

“That’s his name. The guy they’re after. No family, some sort of fugitive. That’s who we’re walking away from.”

“We have no hope of finding him in this crowd. Do you even know what he looks like?”

“Half Human, half Zabrak. There’s a photo from when he was a kid, but it’s old, he’d be hard to recognize. I was hoping he’d stand out.”

Trips scanned the crowd. There were thousands of beings wrapped up in the world of lights, swirling around each, faces alternately lit and darkened in flashes, distorting features, creating masks of light and shadow. He had only been able to find Vala with his Force Sight. He wasn’t even sure that the Sight would work with someone he had never met before.

“We can’t stay here,” he said.

“I know,” Vala said. “But I had to try.”

She turned around. Her eyes were dark, sunken, like she hadn’t slept for days. Trips holstered his pistol.

“Come back to the ship, Vala.”

“Yeah, okay,” she said. She took a step forwards and was bowled over by a figure in a hooded jacket.

“Hey!” she barked. “Watch it, buddy!”

The figure scrabbled to its feet, and Trips saw a face within the hood, lit from within with a faint blue glow. He was a boy, about sixteen, with features that could be described as delicate but for a hatchet of a nose jutting from his face. He was a half-breed, part Zabrak, part Human. He’d shaved his human hair so that the horns still jutted out and were visible under the cloak, but the sharp edges and hard features of the Zabrak had been rounded off with Human softness..

Their eyes met, then the boys eyes went wide, and his lips drew back in something between a rictus and a growl.

“Clone,” he said, and lashed out with a kick that took Trips directly in the midriff. Trips doubled over in pain.

“Trips!” Vala shouted, “That’s him, that’s Jazak Brask!”

“Wait,” Trips groaned weakly, but Vala had already been swallowed up by the crowd, running after Brask. Trips pulled himself back upright.

“Commander?” a voice from behind him asked. Two men stood behind him, dressed in the anonymous mid-budget clothing of an undercover policemen. “We weren’t aware you were participating in this operation.”

Trips shot them both with the stunner. The music from a nearby Krayt Dragon, ringed in neon and bass, covered the sound.

He followed the sounds of indignant tourists and came crashing through the crowd himself, leaving a wake of confusion and dropped carnival food behind him. Emerging from the crowd into an alley, he saw Vala disappear up a ladder onto the roof of one of the warehouses in the district. He groaned and mounted the rungs. He cleared the edge of the roof in time to see Vala catch up to Jazak and tackle him.

There was a brief scuffle, though from where Trips was standing it looked like each of the combatants was fighting more to untangle their limbs than to subdue the other. Vala tumbled backwards out of the scrum, coming to rest on her elbows.

“Wait, hold on!” she yelled. “I’m Vala Din and we’re here to rescue you.”

Jazak’s hood had fallen off in the collision, and Trips could now see that unlike a full-blood Zabrak, Jazak’s horns grew smaller from back to front, giving his head a slightly unbalanced appearance. He tilted his head to the side.

“You’re a little short for a bounty hunter,” he said.

“I’m not a bounty hunter,” Vala said, somewhat disdainfully. “Also, I’m not short!”

“But then why—“ his eyes landed on Trips, and he grabbed at his belt as he crab-crawled backwards. Trips raised his arms halfway into the air. Vala glanced back.

“Hey, that’s just Trips. He’s with me. He’s not a threat.”

Jazak’s hand came up from his belt. Trips realized what he was holding a split second before he activated it, and he went numb with disbelief. A blue glow lit the air between Jazak and Vala with a familiar hum and crackle: lightsaber.

In the bright line of the lightsaber, he could see Bree Knightrose, flashing ahead of them, battle droids and bright sparks flying to either side. His brothers stood at either side of him, Rook, the strength and shield; Shutter, the efficient killer; Mayday, the choleric medic; and Frag, the consummate professional. They had survived as a unit where so many others had fallen, emerging scarred but alive, succeeding where they could and surviving when they couldn’t. And Bree had been their heart, the Jedi padawan whom they had helped raise to a full-fledged Jedi Knight. The Jedi who they had refused to kill, despite orders, and despite the bio-programming designed to overcome such a refusal.

There was another hiss and crackle from behind him, and Trips realized that Jazak was not looking at him, but beyond him. He turned, slowly, dreamlike, knowing what he would he see.

There were two of them, an adult and a juvenile, both female. They were humanoid, though not of a species that Trips recognized. Each had a set of bony spurs set on the outside of their forearms and legs, and a large v-shaped structure protruding from the bridge of the nose and following the curve of the forehead, before narrowing to opposite points several inches above the head. The adult was colored a deep red, with sickly green spirals swirling up her arms and neck, visible through a set of loose robes that reached up to cover her head. The girl looked to be a teenager, her skin pink and olive in contrast to the more garish colors of her elder. She did not wear a cowl and kept her hair in a short ponytail. There was a familial resemblance between the two, something in the lips and the nose and the dark expression each of them wore. The adult (mother?) had a face that had been carved out by repetition of expression, all haughty anger and icy disdain. The girl still wore the potential of youth, and though she shared some expressions, her features hadn’t been fully shaped by age.

They both held lightsabers, red as hate against the night sky, the unofficial badge of the Imperial Inquisitors.

“You’re not Avarice,” the younger one said accusingly.

“Of course not,” said the elder. “He’s the other. The one who stole our ship. And you shouldn’t sell him short, dear,” she said, smiling cruelly at Vala, “He is very much a threat.”

“Stay back,” said Trips, pointing his pistol at the pair. The older woman flung out her arm and the pistol leaped out of his hand, skittering across the rooftop and landing at her feet. The girl casually sliced it in half with her saber. Trips drew his vibrosword, keeping a careful grip on it. It gleamed strangely under the Cianculan moon.

“Subdue the children,” the Inquisitor said to her younger companion. “Do not damage them.”

She leaped at Trips with the impossible agility and speed of a Force user, her lighsaber slashing down at him. He flipped his vibrosword up, and instead of cutting right through it, the saber slammed against the surface, throwing off sparks.

“Cortosis weave,” she said, eyebrows raised. “You are full of surprises, aren’t you, clone?”

Trips threw her back with superior strength, and then braced himself as she unleashed a percussive wave of pure Force at him, causing his feet to slide backwards on the roof surface.

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Jazak clashing with the girl. He was clumsy, taking huge, unbalanced swipes with his saber which the girl dodged with a practiced air. His amateurism helped his efforts, giving him an unpredictability that inspired caution in his more experienced foe. But it couldn’t last for long, and she drove him back with a quick flurry of blows designed unbalance him, only falling back as Vala fired a series of ill-aimed stun bolts into the fray.

Then the Inquisitor was on him again. He parried a blow to his legs meant to bait him into exposing himself, then caught her with an elbow as he swung around to catch the intended killing blow. In his experience, Jedi and other Force users thought only in terms of lightsabers, and were rarely prepared to be smacked in the face with something more mundane.

She fell back, then used the momentum from the strike to lash out with a foot, catching Trips on his side, and staggering him backwards. Balance re-established, she pressed forward with a flurry of attacks that Trips parried desperately.

The problem with fighting against a lightsaber was one of weight. A lightsaber weighed nothing, whereas a vibrosword weighed a good ten pounds. In an extended bout between two evenly matched opponents, the combatant with the vibrosword would eventually wear down and fall to fatigue-induced mistakes. And Trips was beginning to think that this was not an evenly matched fight.

As the Inquisitor drove him back, he could see Vala and Jazak fighting their own battle. The girl had gained confidence, and was toying with Jazak, baiting him into an attack, then throwing him into the ground. When Vala retaliated with a stun shot from her blaster, the girl reflected it back with a sweep of her saber, hitting Vala in the arm. She immediately cried out and dropped the blaster, arm hanging loosely at her side.

They were going to lose, he realized. He launched into a series of sweeping attacks, using the momentum of his sword to swing into each of his next attacks, momentarily taking advantage of the weight difference. The Inquisitor dropped back, forced unexpectedly onto the defensive. Trips pushed forwards, raining blow after blow down onto the Inquisitor’s lightsaber, sparks showering across the rooftop. She grimaced with each impact. It would only take one good strike to open up her guard, subdude her with a grapple. And the she spun backwards. He leaped forward to take advantage of the ground given, but was caught with another blast of Force, throwing him to the ground.

He swung his sword around, one-handed, just in time to catch the lightsaber before it gouged into his side. But pinned against the ground he had no leverage, and the saber descended. He could feel the heat as the saber contacted his clothing, burning right through it.

The Inquisitor grinned, teeth bared and shoved down further, and Trips cried out as the blade forced its way into his side. He could feel his strength ebbing, and his free hand raked across the surface of the roof looking for purchase. It found only his grapple gun.

He pulled the trigger and it fired with a loud cough. The Inquisitor looked surprised for a moment, then smiled.

“It was a good try, clone. You missed.”

“Don’t think I did,” Trips said, and depressed the retraction button on the handle. The grappling hook had lodged itself into a nearby cooling tower, and he was yanked towards it at high speed. The Inquisitor came with him, but when Trips hit the button again, his progess was halted while her momentum carried her forwards, over the edge of the roof and into the wall of an adjacent building, where she bounced off with an ugly crack and fell into the alley below. The lightsaber retracted with a rough, empty sound of suction.

Their remaining opponent, the strange girl with the lightsaber turned away from Jazak, who was lying on the ground.

“Mother!” she shrieked, and leaped off the side of the building, kicking off of the same warehouse the Inquisitor had slammed against before dropping lightly to the ground.

Trips tried to move, but couldn’t manage much more than to roll on his side. He hadn’t taken a full blow like the Inquisitor, but he had landed on his injured side. He touched his hand to the injury and it came away red and sticky. Ordinarily a lightsaber wound would self-cauterize, preventing the kind of bleeding wound that could kill with time. But Trips had come down hard on his side, tearing open the charred and blackened flesh. He rolled onto his back and tried not to breathe too deeply.

Vala appeared at his side, arm hanging loose. Jazak came limping up next to her.

“Are you alive?” she asked.

“For the moment.”

He managed to pull himself into a sitting position. He had been quite proud of the lack of screaming, but Vala and Jazak seemed less impressed.

“We have to get out of here,” he said.

“I don’t think we can get you down the ladder,” said Vala.

“He might not survive it,” said Jazak. “That’s a severe injury, and I’m worried about his retrohepatic veins, to say nothing of liver damage. We shouldn’t move him.”

Trips shifted his weight underneath him and levered himself up using his uninjured side. The pain was severe, a numb throbbing that spiked whenever he moved.

Jazak blinked, wide-eyed.

“If we stay here, we die,” Trips said. “I can climb.”

 

It turned out he could dangle precariously, catching himself in a controlled fall from rung to rung until about halfway down he missed entirely and crashed to the ground. He briefly lost consciousness. When he regained it, Vala and Jazak had assumed now-familiar worried positions above him.

He outstreteched an arm. Vala grabbed it tentatively with her own remaining good arm and pulled him up. He roared with pain as he came upright and nearly lost consciousness again. Perhaps he did lose consciousness. He didn’t remember Jazak and Vala looping his arms around them, moving in a half-stumble, half-carry back into the Night Market crowd. He remembered flashes there, a small child staring at him, clutching the leg of an oblivious parent; Vala struggling to hold up his weight with a single arm, Jazak’s limp drumming an uneven cadence.

“What is he?” Jazak muttered quietly.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Vala retorted.

“Clones follow orders. Clones hunt Je—people like me. They don’t save them from the Empire.”

“Well he’s not a normal clone, then.”

“Apparently. And where are we taking him?”

“The ship. I’m pretty sure there are medical supplies on the ship.”

“You don’t know?”

“Not really our ship. It’s a recent development.”

No one questioned them in the Night Market, likely assuming them to be drunks, or losers of some pointless fight, or likely both. They emerged from the crowd, stumbled down another dark alleyway, and then were swallowed back up by the Inquisitor’s ship, and into the room that had formerly imprisoned Kilka.

Jazak and Vala levered him onto a handy table, one that looked vaguely medical in nature. Vala then slid down the side and rested on the floor, while Jazak began looting drawers and supply crates.

“This isn’t a medical bay,” said Jazak.

“It’s a utility bay with medical capabilities,” Vala said. “I saw that in the ship’s registry.”

“It looks more like a prison block. And most of these drugs are more related to interrogation than healing.”

“Again, not really our ship.”

“Whose ship is it then?”

“Mine.”

The girl from the rooftop stood in the doorway. Where previously her expression had been cold and disinterested, now the anger pulled tight across her face, lit from underneath by her lightsaber. She raised a hand and Jazak went flying into the wall before he had a chance to activate his own saber. Vala held up Trips’ sword awkwardly with her unstunned arm. Trips grabbed at his belt holster, but it was completely empty. He tried to bring himself up into a fighting position, but only succeeded in rolling off of the table and landing prone on the floor.

The girl walked into the room with a slightly performative strut, and the expression of a self-satisfied lothcat.

“This is convenient. I barely needed to leave my bunk.”

She stood over Trips, who grabbed her ankle ineffectually. How much blood had he lost? She raised her lightsaber high into the air, and a huge furry gray hand closed around her arm. Rapid expressions of suprise, outrage, and then horror flashed across her face, and then Kilka picked her up by her arm and slammed her into the ground once, twice, and then a third time. The lightsaber flickered off.

Trips rested his head against the floor, looking at the girl’s limp form.

“Is she dead?”

Kilka turned its head towards the girl with a strange intensity. It paused several seconds.

“No,” they said.

“Good,” Trips muttered. “Take off. “Now. Before the other one gets here as well.”

He turned his head back to stare up at the ceiling. It was funny, the red lights there had been giving him a slight headache before, but now they seemed darker, less intense. There was something else important, but he couldn’t remember what. And his mouth didn’t seem to be moving properly. And why were the lights so dark…


	4. Chapter 4

Rook was making pancakes. Pancakes were not, strictly, Republic standard rations, but Rook had been able to cobble together something from the various proteins and binders that stocked a Republic field kitchen. He refused to tell anyone the recipe, and really, none of them had ever actually eaten pancakes, so it was even odds whether any of it was authentic. He hummed as he cooked. Rook always hummed when he cooked, but this time it sounded a little off. This song was familiar, but Trips couldn’t quite place it. It was vaguely alien and a little bit beyond Rook’s musical abilities.

“Morning, Trips,” Rook said. He grinned, the smile transforming the horrible burn on the side of his face into something almost pleasant. He flipped a pancake out of the pan, then dropped it on a plate, which he then slid onto the kitchen table. The table was not Republic regulation, covered in a red-and-white checkered tablecloth, and set against a wooden window in the side of the old shuttle. Sunlight streamed through the glass, and he could see the green of an old tree swaying gently outside.

“Rook,” Trips said. He sat down in front of his plate. “I think I’m dreaming. Or dying.”

“No, no, this is definitely my dream,” said Rook. He continued with his strange humming.

“If it’s your dream, then why do you sound like Kilka?”

“What’s a Kilka?” Rook asked. “And anyways, I’m humming ‘East Side Jun of Arch’. But—“ and he pointed a spatula in the air “—Bree says that outside elements often intrude into a Force dream. So we see and hear things that are mixtures of our surroundings, our inner feelings, and visions from the Force. So I’m dreaming you into this Force dream, and you’re dreaming about what’s going on around you.”

He tossed another pancake into the air and paused, mid flip. The pancake did not return.

“But that’s not right. If you’re my dream, you don’t have any surroundings. Unless you’re dreaming me, dreaming you, dreaming me.”

“Rook,” Trips said, “If this is a Force dream, then I think we’re both...us.”

“Or,” Rook said, “You have an important message for me. Wait, wait, let me write this down.”

He walked over to an ancient refrigerator, which had a writing implement attached by a string to a board.

“Okay, let me have it!”

“Rook, no, it’s me. It’s really Trips. And it’s really you. You’re alive! Is Bree alive? Are you both alright?”

Rook was writing furiously on the board.

“Trips, this prophecy isn’t making any sense. Look, I’m going to go get Bree, and we’ll sort this all out together.”

“No, wait, Rook, that’s not how—“

But then he was gone. The sunlight from the window faded, turned cold and gray. And the kitchen was no longer warm and homey. The cooking smells dissipated into an old, stale, dusty scent. Without the sunlight, the stark, overly bright lighting of the Republic shuttle reasserted itself, and the room looked vast and empty.

He was standing now, the table gone, and the window returned to Republic standard, looking out into space. He walked towards the corridor, each step floating with the gentle numbness of dream physics. The corridor was dark, the lights turned off or burnt out. He stepped through the doorway, and he was back on the Inquisitor ship, creeping towards the cockpit. He held a blaster in his hand, and he pointed it at the figure in the pilot’s seat. But the figure did not turn or even move. Instead, Trips slid towards it involuntarily, his weapon gone, his feet frozen. He tried to turn away, but his body was slow to react, his nerves transmitting through thick syrup.

There was something horrible about the figure in the chair, something he knew but couldn’t remember. And as he struggled with his own limbs it came to him that if he was found, then he was trespassing in a world that he didn’t understand. There was roaring all around him, and the walls of the cockpit stretched out, and he was rushing forward straight towards the terrible thing in the seat. He could anticipate the impact of his body and face against the back of the chair, approaching it with terrible speed. The figure suddenly tilted its head, then began to turn around, and he could see bright yellow light blazing from its face. And just before he could see its eyes, before the light threatened to immolate him completely, he awoke to screaming.

 


End file.
